Project 01: Conway’s Game of Life

Outline

1. Program Introduction
2. Simulation by Hand
3. Program Usage
4. Get Started!

Conway’s Game of Life

• 0 player game played on a grid of squares
• Each cell (square) can be alive or dead
• Next step/generation determined by current configuration
  • each cell has 8 neighbors
  • whether a cell is dead or alive in next generation depends on number of alive neighbors

Your Task

• Complete implementation of Conway’s Game of Life
• Experiment and find “interesting” initial configurations

The Challenges

1. Understand and work with a larger program
   • given a lot of code, much of it unfamiliar
   • understand structure enough to work with the code
2. Implement Life
3. Use your program to experiment!

The Rules

“Game” played on square grid of cells

• each cell has 8 neighbors
• cells can be in one of two states: alive or dead
• system evolves in rounds

Each Round

State of each cell in the next round is determined state in this round:

1. If cell is alive and 2 or 3 live neighbors, it stays alive
2. If cell is dead but has 3 live neighbors, it becomes alive
3. Otherwise, cell is dead in next round

Test Your Understanding

Simple Examples I (Red = Alive)

Simple Examples II (Red = Alive)

Using the Program

1. Compile and run from terminal
2. Terminal usage:

java Life <init file> <no. of generations> <interface: Graphic or Text>

Testing Examples

Wild Behavior

Why do People Like CGoL?

1. Simple rules, unexpectedly complex behavior
2. Behavior is provably unpredictable
   • given two configurations there is no algorithm that determines whether a game started from the first config eventually reaches the second
3. Can “program” certain behavior
   • Life can simulate an arbitrary computer program

Initialization File Structure

4 4     // dimensions of board (square)
1 1     // coordinates of alive cells 
1 2
2 1
2 2

Get Started!